Abstract

Selecting an appropriate business process modeling technique forms an
important task within the methodological challenges of business process management
and workflow engineering projects. Many of the available techniques have been
developed on the basis of Petri nets, which is a popular modeling technique for
workflow-oriented applications. Despite the popularity of Petri nets, however, a
comprehensive evaluation of this standard notation is still required. Such an evaluation
would afford a deeper understanding of the capabilities and shortcomings of this
fundamental process modeling technique. This paper presents the first contribution
towards a theoretically sound analysis of the representational capabilities of Petri nets.
Based on an established methodology, we conducted a representational analysis of
Petri nets using a representation model based on the Bunge ontology. Through this
work, we identify a number of issues related to the practice of process modeling with
Petri nets in contemporary process management initiatives. Our findings contribute to
the ongoing revision and extension of process modeling techniques based on Petri nets
and as such may lead to more mature solutions to business process modeling and
management.

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